Putting Our Heads Together to Make Yoga History

A week ago today we kicked off Together We’re One, our Razoo crowdfunding campaign to support Yoga: The Art of Transformation, the world’s first exhibition of yogic art. Opening this October at the Sackler, Yoga will include temple sculptures, devotional icons, and vibrant manuscripts, as well as early-modern photographs, books, and films.

Because of yoga’s broad appeal, we thought this was the perfect opportunity to launch a crowdfunding campaign, enabling lots of people to get involved in helping us make yoga history.

The image we’ve chosen for the campaign was painted in the eighteenth century, but we felt like it was speaking to us today. The deity Krishna is known as “Master of Yoga” in the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred Hindu text, when he reveals his infinite cosmic form (Vishvarupa), which encompasses all time, space, and beings. An artist from the Himalayan foothills of India evoked the vast and proliferating universe by depicting Krishna with sixty multicolored heads and forty-four pinwheeling arms.

Everyone on the Razoo team loved this image for the campaign because it evokes a community working together. Debra Diamond, curator of the exhibition, also recommended this image because one of yoga’s most powerful transformations is realizing that the self and the universe are one.